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Realm Mobile Database Taps IBM's Watson To Demo New Pro Edition

• By David Ramel
• December 12, 2016

To highlight the capabilities of its new namesake Realm Mobile Platform Professional Edition, the mobile database specialist tapped in to the cognitive computing power of IBM's Watson technology for a demonstration of sophisticated image processing capabilities.

Targeting midsized enterprises, the new Realm Mobile Platform Professional Edition sits in between the company's free Developer Edition and its top-level Enterprise Edition. The company said all three provide flexible tools for helping macOS and Linux developers to easily create offline-first, reactive mobile apps for iOS and Android.

To introduce the new offering, the company collaborated with IBM's cloud and mobile teams to use Watson's Visual Recognition API, available on the Bluemix cloud app development platform. The two companies teamed up to produce Realm Scanner, an open source demo app that lets users submit a photo for quick analysis and identification.

"The user then gets realtime results thanks to Realm Mobile Platform Professional Edition’s two-way instant synchronization and event handling technology," Realm said in a statement today. "The app demonstrates capabilities applicable for a variety of applications, including location identification for VR applications, face recognition for security, categorizing images for industrial and scientific applications, reading labels in retail applications, and much more. The demo application and all of its code is available on GitHub as a free open source project for developers to use, starting today."

The IBM team provided more details in a blog post published today that's titled "Visual Recognition Mobile App with Watson, Realm, and Swift.

"Through this example built in collaboration with the Realm team, you learn a different pattern on building a cognitive mobile application," the IBM post said. "The Scanner app allows users to take a picture of an object, and with the help of Watson Visual Recognition Service, get a pretty good idea what the object is. In addition to recognizing the image, the app also invokes face detection and text recognition, too."

The underlying pattern for the cognitive demo app is called API mobilization or API bridging, Realm said in its own post. Whatever you call it, it involves creating highly responsive apps with great user experiences that also meet the common requirement to connect to and synchronize with existing APIs that could come from modern service like Watson or existing legacy systems.

"The challenge for the mobile developer is that all network requests are asynchronous and can fail," Realm said. "We encounter many organizations with complex business logic requiring multiple API calls in a specific order. Managing the network requires additional code to orchestrate these requests, including handling the many failure scenarios. While this is a challenge on its own, each network request requires converting data into a new format, such as JSON. Again, further code is required to deal with the pain of serialization/deserialization, and bugs can easily appear when the data or schema changes."

The new professional edition is available now in a free 60-day trial. Regular pricing, starting at $1,500 per month, is explained here.